PDF to Text

A tiny CLI utility to stream large PDF files into plain text without loading the entire file into memory. It wraps pdfminer.six with page-based iteration, configurable LAParams, a friendly CLI spinner, and safe logging so you can batch-process enormous PDFs. When conversion finishes, the CLI prints a summary showing file sizes and elapsed time.

Installation

1. Create or activate your Python virtual environment (the repository already contains .venv/).
2. Install the requirements:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

python pdf_to_text.py INPUT_PDF [-o OUTPUT_TXT] [OPTIONS]

Examples

Convert an entire PDF:

python pdf_to_text.py documents/manual.pdf

Extract a subsection without overwriting an existing file:

python pdf_to_text.py big-output.pdf --page-range 50-150 \
    --output extracted.txt --overwrite

Append additional content to an existing transcript if you are processing PDFs in chunks. The CLI will show a lightweight animation while it works:

python pdf_to_text.py another-chunk.pdf --append --output extracted.txt

Helpful flags

• --page-range: specify start-end to control the page window (e.g., 10- for everything after page 10).
• --encoding: control the output text encoding (default utf-8).
• --char-margin, --line-margin, --word-margin, --boxes-flow, --detect-vertical: customize pdfminer.six layout heuristics when dealing with complex columns or rotated text.
• --quiet / --log-level: mute or raise logging verbosity.
• --no-spinner: disable the CLI animation (it is automatically muted when --quiet is used).

Testing

Run the CLI with --help to verify the script starts without errors:

python pdf_to_text.py --help

For more thorough testing you can write automated tests that call convert_pdf_to_text with a short PDF fixture (e.g., created by fpdf or reportlab).